1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates to an image forming device and a computer-readable storage medium in which software components, each of which is configured to execute a process constituting a part of a job with respect to image data, are connected and the job is performed by the connected software components.
2. Description of the Related Art
An image forming device which utilizes the concept of pipe and filter architecture is disclosed in Japanese Laid-Open Patent Publication No. 2007-325251, and this image forming device incorporates an application which performs a job according to a software component (which is called activity) that is constituted by a set of filters (which are software components. This image forming device makes it possible to facilitate the customization or extension of functions related to image formation.
On the other hand, there is an image forming device of another type among various types of image forming devices. This image forming device is provided with a function that extracts embedded information from image data obtained by scanning a document, and analyzes the information related to the document (for example, detection of falsification of a document, tracing of distribution channels, output person detection, etc.). In the following, this function will be called a marking detecting function. For example, Japanese Laid-Open Patent Publication No. 2006-20258 discloses an image forming device of this type.
A case in which the marking detecting function is carried out using the image forming device disclosed in Japanese Laid-Open Patent Publication No. 2007-325251 will be considered. In this case, information is extracted from an image input by an input filter, analysis processing of the extracted information is performed, and a filter (or “marking detecting filter”) which outputs the result of the analysis processing is created.
If falsification detection and output person detection are taken into consideration, the composition includes the information extracting processing, the analysis processing, and the analysis result output processing, which types of processing are different from each other. For this reason, it is necessary to create a marking detecting filter depending on the use of the information embedded in the document image. Therefore, when both the falsification detection function and the output person detection function have to be implemented in an image forming device, it is necessary to create both a marking detecting filter corresponding to the falsification detection function (or a falsification detecting filter) and a marking detecting filter corresponding to the output person detection function (or an output person detecting filter).
Moreover, an activity (software component) must be created for each combination of an input filter and a marking detecting filter. For example, in the case of falsification detection and output person detection, it is necessary to create two separate activities: a falsification detecting activity using the falsification detecting filter and an output person detecting activity using the output person detecting filter.
Such development work is simple for the related art including Japanese Laid-Open Patent Publication No. 2007-325251. However, if the point that there are many common portions in the respective marking detecting filters and the respective activities using each of the marking detecting filters is taken into consideration, it is desirable to further improve the customizability of information processing functions of information embedded in image data.